This volume recounts the history of Hispano merchants in the nineteenth-century overland trade between Santa Fe and the Missouri frontier. Historians have generally focused on famous Anglo merchants, but the author demonstrates, that Hispanos were major participants in the trade by 1840. New Mexico's geographic isolation and Mexican commercial restrictions forced the Hispano elite to turn to trading raw materials and specie to the United States.

As the volume of trade increased in the 1830s and 1840s, the mercantile sophistication of the Hispano merchants developed apace. Their complex transactions and sophisticated financing linked together Chihuahua City, Santa Fe, St. Louis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York City, London, and Paris. After the Mexican-American War, their influence expanded with the volume of trade, which climaxed in the 1870s.

The author argues that, contrary to racial stereotypes, Hispano merchants were every bit as driven to material productivity and as business savvy as German and Anglo competitors in the Santa Fe Trade.